Unraveling Another Wartime Tragedy

...the uniforms they were wearing when captured had been issued by the Germans to replace the rags which were all that remained of their original clothing...

...the fear that Western prisoners of war would be held back if the democracies balked at repatriating prisoners demanded by the Soviets...

...Even statesmen and diplomats are capable of learning from experience, however...

...When a similar situation arose at the end of the Korean War, Anthony Eden, one of the strongest advocates of repatriation in 1945-46, sponsored the program that allowed North Korean prisoners of war to stay in the South...

...Still worse, a considerable number of the prisoners-notably the Cossacks, who emigrated to Austria shortly after the Soviet Civil War-never were Soviet citizens...

...the charge that the men, in fighting with the Nazis, had committed treason and deserved no mercy...

...Although the main facts have long been known, Lord Bethell's book, based on newly released official documents in England and America, provides the first accurate, detailed and dispassionate account of the tragedy...

...Indeed, as Lord Bethell shows, it was the British and American soldiers-those who had to pound the prisoners into submission with clubs, rifles and bayonets-who launched the protest against forcible repatriation that eventually led to its abandonment...

...The Soviet government, as a matter of principle, made no provisions for its troops when they fell into enemy hands...

...The brutal and demoralizing deportation of the Cossack communities, requiring both force and fraud on the part of the British, was entirely indefensible...

...By the time a change of policy had been decided on, though, nearly all the men and their families had been delivered into Soviet hands...

...British, too, were the soldiers and commanders who initially raised their voices-in vain-to protest this action that they recognized spelled death or deportation to a labor camp for its victims...

...In his preface to The Last Secret, Hugh Trevor-Roper sums up the principal arguments used then and subsequently to justify the transfer: the wish to placate Stalin in order to maintain the wartime Grand Alliance into the period of postwar reconstruction...

...Reviewed by Robert M. Slusser Professor of History, Michigan State University In the chaotic conditions following World War II, the two principal Western Allies, Great Britain and the United States, rounded up and handed over to the Soviet authorities more than 2 million Russian men, women and children on the grounds that the men had fought with the Nazis against the USSR...

...Contrary to the views of the revisionist historians, Western diplomats and statesmen did their best to prolong the partnership with Stalin, even when this meant violating basic principles of human decency...

...In the perspective of history, the importance of this whole sorry affair may be the part it played in the breakup of the Grand Alliance...

...Furthermore, many of the men had not fought in the German Army...

...and the need to respect international treaties, in this case the secret agreement on repatriation negotiated at Yalta...

...The emphasis is on the British role, and rightly so, since they were the ones who initially encountered the prisoners wearing German uniforms, and who worked out the rationale for returning them...

...But as Lord Bethell finds, the basic decision to turn over the prisoners had been reached by British officials well before that controversial conference took place, and Western concern with treaty sanctity continued to be cited as a justification long after Soviet violations of the Yalta agreement in Poland and elsewhere had become common knowledge...